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tracking in game trails: LOOKING AFRESH AT THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY IN SOUTH AFRICA

JANE CARRUTHERS

 

ABSTRACT

This essay identifies the major trends and theoretical underpinnings of South African environmental history, and places them within the context of recent political, social, and economic developments in the post-apartheid era. Skeptical about Western conservation models, attentive both to the concerns of local communities and to transnational themes, and alert to issues of power, space, agency, and identity, this new historiography has reconfigured the colonial past in environmental terms and set an ambitious agenda for future research.

IN THE LATE 1980s southern African environmental history could be described as a field "virtually totally neglected," but since then a rich literature on a variety of environmental issues—biodiversity conservation, eco-justice, colonial agricultural policy and science, and landscape heritage among them—has developed.1 Not surprisingly, environmental history first took root in South Africa as the end of the apartheid era loomed. Two factors were mainly responsible. The first was the rich tradition of social history that began in the 1970s when, in opposition to the prevailing Afrikaner Nationalist and Liberal historiography, a younger generation of radical scholars employed a Marxist paradigm of class relations to explain African dispossession, capitalist industrialization, the disruption of indigenous lifestyles, and African strategies of resistance to oppression in South Africa.2 This social history was overtly politically activist and it resonated with environmental themes that emerged as increasingly relevant when a nonracial democratic society seemed imminent.3 1
      The second factor underlying this attention to ecohistorical themes during the early 1990s was the development of environmentalism as an international political movement. In the South African situation of that time, this translated into robust debates around environmental justice within an anticipated socialist order. These debates focused on "brown" rather than "green" issues: demands for clean water and less industrial pollution, worker safety, and land for housing and subsistence farming. The popular literature that emerged in this period was thus closely allied to ecosocial history, while more activist in tone than its academic counterpart. Using slogans like "apartheid divides, ecology unites" and "the greening of our country is basic to its healing," environmentalism rode a wave of euphoria. The expectation was that after a divided political past, all South Africans, regardless of race, class, or age, would care for the physical environment because—unlike authoritarian apartheid—environmentalism was grass-roots mobilization for "our future and for our children" within a united democratic nation.4 Saliem Fakir, a land activist at that time and currently a board member of the South African National Biodiversity Institute, recently acknowledged that the "one great window of opportunity ... was the roaring 1990s."5 2
      The political manifestation of this optimism was that in 1994, basing its policy on the premise that environmental dysfunction was rooted in apartheid and white domination, the incoming African National Congress (ANC) government created a Cabinet portfolio for the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), a developmental initiative with a strong pro-environmental agenda. Given that historiographical renewal in approach and theory most often emanates from contemporary concerns, ecosocial environmental history in the 1990s seemed to capture the moment well. But the RDP turned out to be just that: a momentary rather than a long-term trend. Just two years later, in June 1996, the RDP was replaced by a conventional macro-economic directive called GEAR (Growth, Employment, and Redistribution). This free-market friendly economic directive is silent on the environment but seems to assume that environmental integrity is incompatible with economic growth.6 Its introduction has deflected environmental concerns away from the main vortex of politics, prioritizing—as it does—employment creation, investment, and the eradication of poverty. When the RDP was disbanded, life was breathed into the Environmental Affairs and Tourism portfolio by the ANC's competent, energetic, and dynamic Mohammed Valli Moosa, who has since moved on to become president of the World Conservation Union. His successor, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, is not a strong political figure, being leader of the National Party (the former party of apartheid) which has now—expediently—merged with the ANC. As a reward, Van Schalkwyk was given a Cabinet post but, perhaps predictably, the portfolio he was offered was that of environment and tourism, which has a low political profile and impact. The international scene has changed too, with priority being given to issues of security and to the expansion of development aid rather than to environmental issues, although global climate change may be the exception here.7 3
      South African society and politics are complex, paradoxical, and unpredictable. Indeed, they are often referred to as "exceptional." There are three capital cities, nine provinces, eleven official languages, numerous political parties, and a mix of state, private, and communal property regimes. There is also an uneasy and sometimes confrontational combination of nondemocratic traditional patriarchal leadership and a modern legal system. The country has a diversity of cultures whose historical interrelationship has been volatile and violent. Scholars who are familiar with colonialism acknowledge that South Africa's past does not fit neatly within the colonial paradigm. (Comparative historians often omit South Africa for this reason, for example, Thomas R. Dunlap in his excellent study Nature and the English Diaspora.8) South Africa is not typical of the rest of Africa either, having as it does a strong commercial and industrial sector. With only about 12 percent of the country being arable, South Africa is agriculturally poor and this sector contributes little to the overall GDP. South Africa's natural attributes are equally complex. Its ecological richness is unparalleled and despite its relatively small area (1,219,912 km2) it is the third most biodiverse country on earth, a "world in one country" as the tourist slogan proclaims.9 Its ten biomes (or ecoregions) include hyper-arid desert, savanna, succulent karoo, tropical forest, alpine heathland, and even an entire floral kingdom (the Cape heathland or fynbos). The geology, climate, and topography vary in like degree, creating a dynamic landscape of enormous international ecological significance. In time and in space, the socio-economic lifestyles of all southern Africans have been influenced directly and indirectly by the natural environment. 4


 
Figure 1
    Figure 1. Informal Settlement Near Johannesburg.

    Photo courtesy of the author.

    With their potential for employment opportunities and alternative livelihood strategies, urban areas attract thousands of people from the impoverished rural areas of southern Africa. Many peri-urban informal settlements are inappropriately sited, placing intolerable burdens for service provision on local governments. Increased governmental attention to the urban environment will generate a growing interest in the environmental history of South Africa's cities.
 


 
      Environmental historians have long interrogated the discipline, and the South African literature is already well served with surveys of the historiography to date.10 It is therefore not the aim of this article to review the output, but rather to suggest trends that are developing in environmental history and to consider the theories that underpin them, given the contemporary political context outlined above. African environmental history has been described as a "rather large can of worms" and the subject generally as "a subdiscipline that is one of the least understood in modern academia [and that claims] more inherent theoretical ambiguities and methodological dilemmas than any other area of history."11 With this caveat, the discussion that follows includes fresh ideas about African identity in an increasingly transnational and globalizing world, a developing spatial dimension in the social sciences, an emerging familiarity with the environmental sciences, and a reconceptualizing of the colonial process. 5
      This is an opportune moment to undertake this exercise, for the "new" South Africa lacks historical stereotypes: There is no guiding or dominating historiographical paradigm as there was in the past. Academic historians of South Africa, whether located at South African or overseas universities, comprise a very small group. With few exceptions, most scholars are white, and it has proven difficult to attract talented black intellectuals into academic life. While South African history has always been shifting and contested terrain, current debates about who "owns" history and who has the "right" to speak for cultural diversity are more frequent and more heated than they previously have been. Despite the high profile of "heritage" in the national psyche as hidden histories are revealed, and the new museums that have been established or the displays in older ones reconstructed, student enrollments in historical studies have dropped considerably since the time when "struggle history" dominated the discourse. Paradoxically, when South Africa was a pariah state its history received considerable international scholarly attention and southern African studies were stronger and more popular than they are today.12 6
      In short, while historians of South Africa were once galvanized along entrenched ideological lines around how best to examine South Africa's racist past, now that the task of abolishing apartheid has been accomplished, the discipline is more fragmented, less aggressive, and lower in profile. Many of the ideologies that sustained vibrant historical writing have collapsed. For a brief time it seemed that environmental history might offer a new paradigm and that a shared landscape would nurture a new inclusive national identity. This did not come about, although environmental themes remain an important historiographical stream. In South Africa, history has always been politically charged. It has engaged with the issues of society and provided a dialogue between present and past, exploring new connections and examining action in its context.13 It is there fore not surprising that new approaches and theories continue in this vein. 7
   

THE AFRICAN CONNECTION

 
DURING THE YEARS of apartheid, from 1948 to 1994, South Africa had an uneasy relationship with the rest of Africa, one that—generally speaking—denied or minimized African connections and celebrated links with the "civilized" West. Geographically the country is fairly isolated, being positioned at the remote and narrow end of this extraordinarily vast and varied landmass that remains unhappily divided by colonial conquest into haphazardly created (or illogically constructed) nation states. During the Cold War, the United States and the Western powers usually supported racist South Africa (while certainly at times being critical of its internal policies) because it was a staunch and reliable anti-Communist ally. With the willing connivance of the South African government, the West also fomented civil wars in African countries where leaders were sympathetic to the Soviet bloc; these included many of South Africa's neighboring states. At the same time, and especially during the 1970s and 1980s, much of South Africa's pro-Communist black political movement was in exile, its leaders having fled in fear of their lives. The energetic external opposition survived with the help of the governments of Libya, Angola, Zambia, and Tanzania in particular, and garnered tremendous support from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Soviet bloc. From exile abroad the ANC and Pan-African Congress directed revolutionary activity inside South Africa. 8
      Since 1994, of course, this banned and exiled liberation movement, together with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, has become the South African government. Not surprisingly, given the support it received both from individual governments and the OAU, it has dramatically changed South Africa's orientation toward Africa with consequences for the writing of history. Extremely strong bonds now exist with the rest of the continent, and South Africa is taking a leading role in its affairs. South Africa was influential in transforming the ailing OAU into the African Union in 2002, and initiating the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) program. Meanwhile, the home of the Pan African Parliament has been sited just outside Johannesburg. Peacekeeping missions and diplomatic initiatives to the rest of the continent are the order of the day. Intellectuals engaged in cultural studies have reflected this political and economic emphasis on Africa and historians are following their lead. The discourse is often overtly anti-Europe and anti-West and revolves around "African solutions for African problems." As a recent newspaper article put it, "part of the liberation of South Africa is to transform it from a European outpost in Africa into an African country with a predominantly African cultural character ... That way we will start to belong where we are."14 9
      As well as realigning South Africa with Africa, the current government also has had to consolidate South Africa's internal national space. The domestic physical landscape was atomized by apartheid's social engineers into contrived and artificial ethnic "homelands" or "Bantustans" for people (and "national parks" for animals) and this legacy has proved hard to eradicate. 10
      Partly because of the political repositioning of South Africa within Africa, but also because of a distinct interest in matters spatial in the social sciences, African space and place are becoming significant in South African environmental history.15 The new concern with cartographical history and demarcation of space is an emerging theme in African environmental history and is likely to grow together with an increasing attention to the visual dimension in general.16 This track is quite different from the materialism and Euro-concerns of Marxist historiography and also from the environmental history of the 1980s and 1990s. The environmental historiography that first came out of the United States and that was influential for South African writers seemed to hold out the promise of a universal historical agenda emanating from the environmental concerns of that period. It was assumed that "doing environmental history" would include issues like international and national wilderness, the role of nature in the nation, the origins of environmentalist causes, and so on. In fact, this has not happened. However, what is becoming evident is that environmental history is making a large contribution to reconsidering African history and ensuring that historians of South Africa write with reference to their continental position. Certainly, biophysical space and shared natural resources (rivers, mountain ranges, savanna systems, etc.) offer a fresh way of thinking about historical connections. 11
      William Beinart has argued that thinking of South Africa as "African" has distanced environmental history from the historiography elsewhere and placed it unequivocally in the fold of African social history, thus contributing to a broader scholarship. In this way environmental history has contributed to African history by refiguring colonialism in environmental terms. A closer analysis of colonial environmental responsibility and African agency has redirected our understanding of power relations and environmental transformation in Africa. This is a trend that is likely to last and to enrich environmental history. Beinart and others consider environmental history to be an aspect of African history, a component of a broader new African historiography that is characterized by an innovative interdisciplinary approach, a corrective anti-colonial perspective, an extension of the range of evidence in terms of new archival sources, by oral fieldwork, by incorporating nonhuman agency and African cultural constructs.17 12
      Thus far the Africanization perspective has resulted in a number of studies that reconsider South Africa's past relations with the rest of Africa by examining environmental themes. Some scholars have begun to re-evaluate South Africa's past interactions with the rest of Africa. Among the interesting recent developments is an exploration of the influence in the 1920s and 1930s of Jan Smuts, a talented thinker and internationalist who spearheaded a number of pan-African scientific initiatives. Important early indications of the richness of this field include Peder Anker's provocative Imperial Ecology, the work of Helen Tilley and Saul Dubow, and the theme and content of much of William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor's Social History and African Environments.18 13
      Another theme that, so far, has been given attention by economic and cultural rather than environmental historians is the reconceptualization of the African city. It was once conventional wisdom that rural Africa (particularly its agricultural base) supported the urban population, but this appears no longer to be the case. Instead, as Bill Freund has recently pointed out, Africa's larger cities have come to resemble city states, especially in those circumstances where the state iself is weak. It is, in fact, the cities that support their regional surroundings and are the main drivers of many African economies.19 Currently, national boundaries seem increasingly porous, a consequence no doubt of globalization, but in the particular circumstances of Africa a result also of the collapse of the state in many parts of the continent. Permeable national borders also result in interstate migration (refugees included), human and animal disease transmissions, and other transformations that have environmental dimensions. 14
   

"THE AFRICAN RENAISSANCE"

 
THE SIGNIFICANCE of the cultural pride that is developing among people who share Africa's space is best appreciated through the "African Renaissance."20 Theoretically, the African Renaissance is predicated on a conjunction between precolonial history and postcolonial thinking. This is a pan-African intellectual movement that encourages Africans to reconnect with each other and with an honorable precolonial heritage. History is certain to enjoy a higher profile, and it is likely that the continental focus will include environmental themes. 15
      In this regard, Africa's almost one hundred World Heritage Sites may well prove instrumental in engaging with the environmental and physical dimensions of African pride, given the global importance and high international profile of the World Heritage movement, as well as the financial, technical, and management assistance that World Heritage status brings with it. South Africa was only admitted to the World Heritage system after 1994 and to date a number of World Heritage Sites have been proclaimed in the categories of natural, cultural, and mixed landscape, each of which has been greeted locally with enthusiasm and pride. Exploring the facts and issues for motivating these sites so as to justify their inclusion in the world list has involved environmental historians in an innovative (though relatively minor) way. As well as their intellectual value, World Heritage Sites have a pragmatic purpose, serving as a conduit for international attention to Africa and, of course, for funding and the exchange of ideas about policy, restoration, conservation, and other areas of expertise. 16
      Heritage and memory, more than historical studies, can be tied to particular places, and a "sense of place" is becoming a stronger trope even outside of organized movements such as World Heritage. To some extent this trend includes an Africanist perspective, which is something that white Africans cannot share to the same extent as blacks can. Like dress, food, and pathways of thinking, celebrating places is a way to negotiate African identity, pride, and vision and to take ownership of past, present, and future. As Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have expressed it, "Heritage has become a construct to conjure with as global markets erode the distinctive wealth of nations."21 17


 
Figure 2
    Figure 2. The Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape.

    Photo courtesy of the author.

    South Africa only became a signatory to the World Heritage Convention in 1997 after apartheid had ended. Since then, with the inscription of some seven World Heritage Sites and the public attention that has been accorded to them, environmental historians have begun to take an increasing interest in the intersection between history, heritage, and landscape. Mapungubwe, a prominent hill on the Limpopo River near its confluence with the Shashe River, is the country's only "Cultural Landscape." This was the site of an influential African kingdom that thrived from 900 to 1290 AD and which, according to the archaeological record, contains substantial evidence of economic prosperity and a social and political hierarchy.
 


 
   

POSTCOLONIAL INFLUENCES

 
BECAUSE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENTAL history is playing an important role in reclaiming African agency and possession, it is paradoxical that so much of the current popular literature about Africa's environmental policy, national parks, and other protected areas continues to reflect an ideology of African inaction, inertia, and helplessness. Naturally, the counterpoint to celebrating the African Renaissance is the more recent colonial past of dispossession and underdevelopment, and the fact that the colonial system was predicated on theories about the cultural and economic inferiority of Africa. It is ironic, however, that this worldview—often very simplistically expressed—is proving so hard to shift when African pride and self-worth are being celebrated at the same time. 18
      The colonial experience is too diverse to be encapsulated in a single postcolonial theory that merely dichotomizes "colonizers" and "colonized," but without doubt it was the most defining historical experience of the continent. The African environment was the site of the struggle for power over people and resources, and for this reason alone the environment is integral to examining other axes of power and injustice.22 From a historical point of view, this means a re-examination of indigenous as well as colonial (or settler) history, and there is evidence of an emerging and sophisticated literature on the latter. As Aaron Sachs has argued, much of the postcolonial perspective includes a circular argument that prevents any possibility of an advance in thinking: It locks all history—including environmental history—into a stereotype of an unchanging bifissured exploitative relationship between monolithic groups, recognizing neither change over time nor specific historical context. It is only through careful and sophisticated historical scholarship that the postcolonial trap of simplistic divides that Sachs believes has crippled environmental history will be avoided and fresh perspectives on colonial and other power structures unearthed.23 In southern Africa, both colonized and colonizers were highly diversified and the imposition of an over-arching "settler mentality" was uneven, specific, and always challenged strongly by ongoing African resistance. The region exhibited great "hybridity" and was (and is) replete with sub-nationalisms and competing subaltern discourses and cultures. Thus, while appreciating the enormous influence of Edward Said on postcolonial studies, both Sachs and John McKenzie accuse Said of committing the very sin he abhorred, that of essentializing and of refusing to admit conditions of exceptionality.24 Beinart refers to a "struggle to free historiography and social studies from narratives of dependence, victimhood and romanticism" and this is the theoretical, even activist, role that environmental history is encouraging.25 In this regard the research of Melissa Leach, James Fairhead, James McCann, Kate Showers, and other environmental historians has gone a long way toward changing both historical and current thinking about African responses to the environment, particularly on the use and history of forests and landscape cover.26 As far as the more popular proselytizing conservation literature is concerned, the time may be right for a new theory to develop out of a more nuanced environmental history that encompasses various African conservation frameworks and histories in more detail. For instance, little is known about what indigenous or authentic regional natural resource strategies might have been, nor how they might be revived or integrated into modern conservation biology and management as "indigenous knowledge." 19
   

TRANSNATIONALISM

 
OF ALL THE SUBFIELDS of history, environmental history cannot be divorced from transnational concerns. Transnationalism is a growing historiographical perspective that deals with cross-national themes (such as migrations, diasporas, multinational corporations, and non-governmental organizations) that have affected the world order.27 Natural resources exist in disregard of national boundaries and, depending on how they are used, they have the power to fracture or to unify communities across borders. The transnational dimension of environmental history has generated debates that have influenced South Africa's environmental history conceptually, in particular the question of just how relevant the environmental history of the United States has been to other parts of the world. Extremely influential in this regard was the work of Richard Grove, author of Green Imperialism and for some years the editor of Environment and History. He and some other historians of British imperialism and colonialism were adamant that environmentalism was originally a consequence of past imperial and colonial eras and not of the modern environmental movement in the United States. Both Grove and John McKenzie, the present editor of Environment and History, have promoted environmental history outside of the United States as being more "interesting and innovative," "more integrated, outward-looking and comparative ... in uncovering the processes and discourses of colonial expansion and cultural encounter" than the "ultra-nationalist" perspective characteristic of North America.28 20
      Grove anticipated, however, that a good deal of convergence would emerge in the environmental historiography of the "subaltern world" and among developing nations. This approach has not yet borne much fruit in historical writings, although comparisons are superficially tantalizing. It is possible that a stronger theoretical base is required in order for this literature to develop properly. Perhaps also the detailed history of disparate areas of the world that share little in common beyond a colonized past is difficult to rein in and may be avoided by specialists for this reason. This means that South African (and African) environmental history will probably not be part of what Tom Griffiths thoughtfully calls "a distinctive endeavour ... [that] ...moves audaciously across time and space and species," that "challenges some of the conventions of history," and "questions the anthropocentric, nationalistic and documentary bases of the discipline."29 Griffiths's conceptualization of environmental history suggests a "world history" perspective which in other subdisciplines of history is becoming increasingly popular and relevant and which is one, in fact, well suited to environmental themes.30 21
      In the southern African literature, many transnational themes suggest themselves, and some historians have tentatively begun to work on them. As far as nature conservation is concerned, the various twentieth-century African conventions on wildlife protection (1900 and 1933) will bear closer examination because they illuminate the cultural construction of the environment in respect to the colonizers and the colonized in changing historical contexts. That Africans are regaining control of and actually leading many of the theoretical debates around the science of conservation biology and human/nature interaction is evident from South Africa's hosting the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 and the Fifth World Parks Congress in Durban in September 2003. Both of these meetings showcased the fact that Africans are actively taking control of the process by prioritizing sustainable human development and displacing Western ideas of environmentalism. There has been, however, criticism from international animal rights and wilderness groups of this very clearly human-centered and materialistic focus as being too utilitarian and neglecting biodiversity conservation.31 22
      Globally the nature conservation agenda has altered, and with it there have been theoretical and practical effects on South African environmental history. This can be seen from the changing World Parks Congress themes and priorities. At the First World Conference on National Parks that was held in Seattle in July 1962 at the height of the Cold War, the aim was to establish more understanding of national parks and to encourage creation of more of them. Only twenty years later in Bali developmental issues were on the table with the theme "Parks for Development." The latest gathering, held in Durban in 2003, was called "Benefits Beyond Boundaries." The message was clear: National parks and protected areas are instruments to enhance human economic development and to provide local, regional, and national services of many kinds and should be managed accordingly. This widening of concern from the environmental to the social and political has been reflected in environmental history more than it has in the natural sciences. 23


 
Figure 3
    Figure 3. "Peace Park."

    Photo courtesy of the author.

    Pictured is the point at which the Olifants River cuts through the Lebombo Mountains between South Africa and Mozambique. These two countries, together with Zimbabwe, have signed a cooperative agreement regarding the joint management of a Transfrontier Conservation Area ("peace park" or transboundary protected area) in order to boost tourism and expand the protected area estate. These transfrontier initiatives involve local communities as equal partners and issues around community participation in biodiversity conservation is currently generating a good deal of scholarly literature.
 


 
      One interesting African transnational initiative that offers possibilities for new thinking about environmental history is what is generally referred to as transboundary conservation. These international parks go under a number of names, including Transboundary Protected Areas, "Peace Parks," and Transfrontier Conservation Areas. In 2000, presidents Thabo Mbeki, of South Africa, and Festus Mogae, of Botswana, signed the first African transfrontier park into law—the 38,000 km2 Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, an amalgamation of South Africa's Kalahari Gemsbok National Park and Botswana's Gemsbok National Park, which straddle the dry Nossob River international boundary. The success of this venture has encouraged similar initiatives in the region and accelerated others throughout Africa, including most recently the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, comprising the Kruger National Park, Mozambique's Coutada 16 and Zimbabwe's Gonarhezhou. The Makuleke communal land also is included on the South African side; after a successful restitution claim their land was excised from the Kruger National Park and returned to the community by South African National Parks. Because of the high profile of the Makuleke land claim, this area already has generated a good deal of literature. Although much of this scholarship discusses the interaction between South African National Parks and the Makuleke, more recently there has been critical literature that moves the discussion away from social policy and considers issues of identity, particularly the paradox of a nationalism that uses "nature" to further the aims of local and international capital and the aspirations of a global elite.32 William Wolmer explores the ramifications of the "surprising coalition of interests" around transboundary conservation areas that are intended to alleviate poverty and please tourists.33 24
      The matter of how best to use the environment for socio-economic development is extremely important for Africa and Africans—far more so than it is in many other countries. There is simply no question of putting fences around conservation areas and following in the old ideology of fortress conservation, excluding people and protecting "wilderness" or "pristine nature." Livelihoods are at stake. Food security is obviously extremely important, but agricultural exports continue to decline as mandatory World Bank structural adjustment programs preclude agricultural subsidies and international markets remain closed to products from underdeveloped countries. By contrast, however, income from eco- and adventure tourism contributes substantially to many African economies. 25
      Transfrontier water politics also is set to become important in the African literature, and with global warming, climate change, and the debates about appropriate water use under these circumstances, there is little doubt that these will be significant topics for environmental historians of the future. Water issues are also replete with ideas relevant to the history of science and technology. This history—which is strongly cultural—is also a growing field.34 26
   

SUSTAINABILITY AND COMMUNITY CONSERVATION

 
IN ADDITION TO, and emanating from, transnationalism and changing global conservation theory are two other trends that are affecting South African environmental history and that generate creative thinking. These are sustainable utilization and community conservation. They are closely linked to developmental theory and economic growth, and they feed into the literature that aims to overturn the stereotypical image of Africa as "hopeless" or in a permanent state of crisis. By its very nature, sustainable use precludes a nonutilitarian approach to the environment: Natural resources of all kinds must pay their way and play a part in development and economic growth. Many people—particularly non-Africans—are critical when this theory begins to edge out other less materialistic approaches to nature. For example, a review of Munyaredzi Chenje's State of the Environment in the Zambezi Basin 2000, expressed concern because the book conceptualized the environment only in terms of a developmental tool and economic resource and gave no place to any nonutilitarian environmental values at all.35 Rosaleen Duffy's Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe is also interesting for its perspective on social equity within a global conservation arena. She discusses the problems generated by balancing conservation management and policy objectives between rural development and poverty alleviation on the one hand and the gratification of aesthetic enjoyment of wealthy foreign tourists on the other.36 27


 
Figure 4
    Figure 4. Ethnicity and Identity.

    Photo courtesy of the author.

    San (Bushmen) curio sellers near the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in the North Cape province of South Africa. Environmental history in southern Africa is growing around issues relating to ethnicity and identity as these relate to indigenous knowledge. In order to satisfy the tourist market some communities affect "traditional" dress and manufacture curios for the passing trade. Such inauthentic cultural tourism perturbs some southern African scholars because it downplays dynamism and change as fundamental to precolonial societies in the region.
 


 
      More nuanced and sophisticated readings of the past are certainly required, and glib statements about precolonial community use of wildlife resources need to be tested historically, as has been done elsewhere. Indeed, the nature of a "community" remains to be unraveled historically. The literature, especially the popular literature, fragments along racial lines, because nature protection is considered to be a "white" concern, even though the protected area estate is managed by black Africans. This view holds sway because black Africans do not generally visit national parks for recreation, while whites do. But parks are fundamentally useful to Africans because tourist revenue is expected to deliver material benefits to local black communities and regional economies. In other words, the environment is used as economic and political leverage. Land re-distribution and, in the case of South Africa, land restitution through legal redress, adds to the mix of issues around wildlife protection and use and the whole idea of biodiversity conservation. The role of the environment as a locus for struggles over political and economic power is thus current, but the historical dimension is important because it considers the interaction between Western environmental ideology, colonialism, and indigenous thinking about natural resources. Despite "Benefits Beyond Boundaries" rhetoric, it remains true that "the entire modern conservation edifice rests on the ideals and visions of people other than Africans."37 But it is far from clear that an innovative or creative African solution is at hand. As expressed in William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor's Social History and African Environments, there are "explicit claims about who best understands African environments, and who should have the right to control them—whether scientists, national governments, or local people. Such arguments have become centrally important as bases for intervention, conservation and regulation. Environmentalists sometimes emphasize ... responsibility to future generations for the well-being of the planet ... Africanists by contrast, sometimes see access to resources as the critical issue for communities ... All such approaches imply both historical investigation and historical judgment."38 As argued by H. Els and J. Du P. Bothma, "the development orientation implicit in the meaning and content of community participation in wildlife management ... still seems not to be well understood by all wildlife managers, most of whom having been trained within broad Western cultural value systems regarding conservation."39 28
      Wilderness, once a dominating theme in environmental history and the genesis of Roderick Nash's thesis about North American nationalistic landscapes, is at present tangential to the current Africanist debates about environmental history.40 There are, however, a few new studies on this theme and it may well develop further, helped, perhaps by the fact that new to South African environmental law is a category of "wilderness" which previously had no legal status.41 Moreover, with the emphasis on meeting tourist demands and generating tourist income—not to mention providing luxurious accommodation, game-drive vehicles in radio contact with each other and the ease of viewing the "Big Five" (lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros, and buffalo)—southern Africa's national parks are becoming removed from any semblance of a "wilderness experience" and are more akin to large zoos. 29
      The present is a time of shifting ideas around conservation that cry out for historical analysis. Fortress-style protected areas have had their day and are vilified by local people, but community conservation is not the panacea it was once thought to be.42 Conservation managers use history—or rather stories about the past—simplistically, in order to bolster policy but also, one suspects, because they are somewhat afraid of historical analysis, ignorant of historical context, wary of professional historians, and unsure of how best to combine the humanities and conservation science.43 30
   

THE NATURAL SCIENCES

 
WHILE ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE economics and ecosocial concerns are only now emerging as historiographically significant, it can be argued that science in Africa, and perhaps even African science, is currently more productive. Currently historians are better informed about agricultural science than about conservation biology because it feeds out of the social history concerns with rural development, but it is likely that the latter may follow. The nexus between politics (local and imperial/colonial), culture, and science is evaluated in some of the newer African environmental histories. Ideologically, the environment is culture-bound, and much thinking about the African environment is related to the colonial experience. Strong tropes were developed in the colonial discourse that continue to affect environmental action even today. Whether African environments were "degrading" and "declining" as so often stated, is a case in point; international financial interventions, related to providing subsistence for growing populations, are often based on this discourse.44 31
      One of the contributions of environmental history in South Africa that may mature is the resolution of "one of the most important and chronically unresolved problems in the philosophy of history," the merging of what C. P. Snow in 1959 famously called the "two cultures."45 Both David Lowenthal and Donald Worster think that environmental history has the potential to close that gap, at least between the humanities, social sciences, and environmental sciences.46 William Beinart's The Rise of Conservation in South Africa is important in this regard, but there is other literature too.47 There is a growing historical concern with issues of "exotic" and "alien" species as opposed to "indigenous" ones that builds upon theories of ecological imperialism.48 Veterinary science is another approach to understanding the cultural construction of nature, while botany, too, is receiving more attention from historians. So is ornithology. Unlike in Australia, southern African historians have not yet discovered or explored "deep time," but some of the earth sciences are being more carefully considered, particularly in the frame of national identity.49 Certainly there are many historians of South Africa who have become more sensitive to the tropes of the natural sciences. 32
      At the same time, however, particularly since jettisoning equilibrium theory and acknowledging disturbance and change, scientists have increasingly put history into their work.50 This significant trend in environmental writing in Southern Africa evokes mixed reactions from the historical academy because the scientific community requires a different kind of narrative and does not feel the need to defer to professional historians. This may be because historians do not do the job that scientists think they should: that of merely finding, collecting, and narrating data.51 There are, however, indications of a more nuanced history from nonprofessionals, which historians need to take account of and which may, in time, encourage a fresh approach. One anthology, Vegetation of Southern Africa, is itself a substantial book of environmental history, although perhaps not all the authors would be comfortable with this description.52 33
   

ANIMALS

 
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN humans and wildlife has loomed large in South African environmental history from the start and there are no signs that this approach is declining—indeed, it is growing in ever more nuanced forms.53 As Harriet Ritvo puts it, "No longer is the mention of an animal-related research topic likely to provoke surprise and amusement, as was the case twenty years ago."54 Africa's large mammals have been a major focus of South African environmental history. Although dealing only tangentially with South Africa, John MacKenzie's book about imperial hunting has been influential indeed. Hunting and natural history are obvious cultural constructions of the environment and there is no doubt that the British Empire and British ideas played a large role in international thinking about African wildlife conservation. Most of the extant historiography thus deals with Anglophone Africa and for this reason antecedents are historically important. There is far less historical attention to Afrikaner values in this regard, particularly during the apartheid era. As far as Afrikaner contributions to natural science are concerned, Sandra Swart on Eugene Marais makes a start—but there is no doubt that Marais and Louis Leipoldt (about whom she has also written) are far from typical of their community.55 The historiography of indigenous animals has highlighted some of the early history of colonial field sciences and this is a growing area of interest, in line with the cultural turn in the humanities as a whole. Entomology is one area of study and work by Harries on missionary H.-A. Junod is informative and important.56 34
      Ornithology is also beginning to attract attention as it has in the United States and Australia.57 There is preliminary work by Nancy Jacobs and Jane Carruthers on this topic.58 Both Lance Van Sittert and William Beinart have considered changing settler values and attitudes about the jackal Canis mesomelas.59 Robert Gordon, Jacob Tropp, and Sandra Swart have analysed the historical and social dimensions of the African dog, argued by some to be a separate domestic dog species, Canis africanus.60 Cultural ideas around sport-fishing have been introduced into the southern African literature by Malcolm Draper in an article about masculinity, colonialism, and trout.61 Jacobs considered the economic as well as the cultural importance of donkeys in an article that appeared in The American Historical Review.62 35
      The obvious importance of animals in human history is that they illuminate so much about society. Harriet Ritvo has observed of the Victorian era that "Killing large exotic animals emerged as both the quintessential activity and symbol of imperialism. Wild animals represented the obstacles that had hitherto prevented colonial territories from joining the march of progress, and had to be eliminated."63 The situation has now been reversed: The Western "march of progress," the so-called "civilized world," is now revolted by any killing of attractive, rare, or otherwise iconic wildlife. Many organizations send donor funds and "experts" to teach Africans the value of living wild animals both from a humane and a tourist-income point of view. "Civilized" values today exclude killing large mammals and felling old trees. Many are the well-funded wildlife missionaries that spread this message throughout the world. Current highly politicized debates around elephant populations are germane in this regard but these also resonate with transnationalism and globalization as well as with ideas around "Africanness."64 36
      Elephants have always been the quarry of colonial hunters because of the mythology that surrounded this species and the value of its byproducts. At issue currently is that there are too few elephants in most parts of their historic range, but too many by far in southern Africa. In this region they may damage biodiversity conservation, and the destruction they cause to aesthetically pleasing landscapes, such as riverine systems, may have an negative effect on the eco-tourist industry that is often considered to be vital to Africa's economic future. Despite a strong and well-documented chronology, historians have been slow to play a part in this discussion. Elephant protection was the reason for the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, founded in London in 1903. The Fauna Society, as it is named today, claims to be the oldest environmental nongovernmental organization in the world. The largest nongovernmental pressure group today, however, is probably the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) based in the United States.65 This organization (like the World-wide Fund for Nature and Conservation International) is active in funding many aspects of wildlife conservation, and in particular supports those initiatives that may save the lives of southern Africa's elephants from the culling process. Most members of this kind of organization are based outside Africa and thus do not have to live with the practical consequences of an overpopulation of elephants or the loss of potential income that ivory and hides would generate. South Africans are affected directly by these ideas, and tension is mounting as southern African countries try to negotiate their way around the fact that they need access to funding and would like to be seen as worthy members of international conservation conventions and organizations. African wildlife conservation efforts badly need global support, but governments and managers also want the liberty to use natural resources for the benefit of the country. The elephant question also exposes weaknesses in conservation biology, because studies on elephants and biodiversity are surprisingly scant and the historical record (e.g. nineteenth-century hunting accounts) is not often taken into account in protected area management today.66 Wildlife management is a historical as well as a policy matter (it is ethical too in terms of animal rights).67 37


 
Figure 5
    Figure 5. Animals Are at the Center of Highly Politicized Debates.

    Photo courtesy of the author.

    The relationship between humans and wildlife has loomed large in South African environmental history and the subject continues to attract attention. Elephants have long been the quarry of hunters, but historians are currently investigating questions around the long-term distribution patterns of the species. Because there are great numbers of elephant in southern Africa they may have a detrimental effect on biodiversity conservation, and the destruction they cause to the landscape may affect the tourist industry on which much prosperity depends.
 


 
      While the human/animal relationship is a rich vein in the humanities and social sciences, it has to be said that so far, natural scientists and protected-area managers have not yet begun to incorporate this historiographical and humanistic dimension into their research work or management plans. An exception is an essay by C. M. Attwell and F. P. D. Cotterill that appeared in Biodiversity and Conservation in 2000.68 38
   

CONCLUSION

 
ANYONE WHO PRESENTS an overview that suggests approaches and theories that are emerging, as I have done here, is scanning for what might mature into strong disciplinary tropes. But one needs to be wary: All too often the future has a way of confounding predictions. Alan Kay, the originator of the computer interface that became Windows software, once said that "The best way to predict the future is to create it"—a task no doubt easier for innovative computer-engineers than it is for historians.69 While Kay's comment is not far off the mark, surveying the past or present to find trends for the future is not a futile exercise. By its nature, history looks backward rather than forward and the core of the discipline remains the search for connections between past and present—the Janus-face of Clio. One needs therefore to flag concerns that are currently important to environmental historians and to link them to the ecopolitics that would produce significant future research. 39
      One fundamental characteristic should be enduring. Deeply embedded in the environmental history of southern Africa is political activism. Lynne Heasley explored this dimension in her "Reflections on Walking Contested Land: Doing Environmental History in West Africa and the United States," published in Environmental History last year. She noted the moral commitment of environmental historians in Africa, in contrast, for instance with scholarly detachment in the United States.70 The social history tradition is alive and energetic in the work of historians of South Africa and needs to remain so. Environmental history is, quite correctly, actively engaged with the problems of society. Doug Weiner, the doyen of Soviet environmental history, explained this as being "unavoidably always on one or another side of power" and further suggested that "every environmental story is a story about power."71 Power relations are brought into sharp relief in the history of colonial and postcolonial Africa. They played out in natural, urban, and agricultural environments with consequences that are everywhere evident. For this reason, more work should be forthcoming on analyzing the origins and pathways of environmental injustice, on the kind of science that supported it, and on the political systems that framed it. It is certain that in the future the existing historiographical base will be further developed, well-trawled, re-interrogated, broadened, and beneficially deepened. The scholarship around colonial ecological ideology and intervention is far from exhausted. Moreover, there is much more to be said about human and other animal interaction, a theme that the elephant-culling debate has highlighted, as have community conservation and the transboundary protected-area initiatives. 40
      The closer connection with the rest of Africa and the African Renaissance agenda brings rich opportunities for comparative, transnational environmental histories, and should encourage research around bioregional concerns, such as shared biomes, river regimes, wars, and natural disasters that are oblivious to national borders. The oceans that create the continent of Africa are also cases in point and the environmental history of marine life and the communities that depend on it—including the history of the "fossil" coelacanth—needs to be prioritized. African agency, a stream that permeates some more recent environmental history, seems set to continue and, in terms of empowerment, this is a critical aspect that needs to infuse the literature. A special plea should be made for the need for greater indigenous knowledge to be incorporated into the mainstream, for this is an enormous absence in southern African environmental history. It is difficult terrain with issues of ownership and cultural identity—and even cultural understanding—at stake, but despite the pitfalls, "scholarly expertise should not subordinate the experiences and knowledge of ordinary people."72 Gregory Maddox put his finger on it when he noted that the "most important idea animating Africanist environmental history ...[is that] ... the landscapes we see and the changes in them we describe are fundamentally the product of human agency" and that understanding the social history of the communities that lived in them is imperative.73 Other themes that require encouragement are biography and the environmental history of heritage places (e.g. Mapungubwe).74 Active collaboration with other disciplines is also imperative. The environmental and agricultural sciences are obvious partners, but archaeology and explorations into even deeper time with the assistance of climatologists or paleo-anthropologists and the like would add immeasurably to the stature of environmental historians as mediators and bridge-builders between knowledge areas. 41
      South African environmental history encompasses an abundance of research endeavors that would enrich our understanding of the past. But in addition to the inherent intellectual challenges they might offer, they also afford opportunities to engage with, inform, and perhaps even influence policy and practice in the future. 42


Jane Carruthers, FRRSAf, is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of South Africa (Tshwane) and a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She pioneered environmental history in South Africa and her book, The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Pietermaritzburg, 1995), has become a classic. She is a versatile historian with interests in heritage and landscape, colonial art and cartography, and the cultural history of science. She is currently vice-president of the South African Historical Society.



NOTES

This article was presented as a paper at the 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences held in Sydney in July 2005, as part of the major theme "Ecohistory: New Theories and Approaches." I would like to thank the organizers, Verena Winiwarter and Ian Tyrrell, and my fellow panelists and colleagues in South Africa and Canberra for their helpful comments. I also acknowledge the support of the University of South Africa, the Australian National University and the National Research Foundation, South Africa.

1. Jane Carruthers, Game Protection in the Transvaal, 1846 to 1926 (Pretoria: South African Archives Yearbook,1995), 1.

2. See, for example, Christopher C. Saunders and Nicholas Southey, Historical Dictionary of South Africa (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 2000).

3. For a discussion on this subject in a non-South African context, see Alan Taylor, "Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental History," Environmental History 1 (October 1996): 6–19.

4. Jacklyn Cock and Eddie Koch, eds., Going Green: People, Politics and the Environment in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1991),15; Eddie Koch, Dave Cooper, and Henk Coetzee, Water, Waste and Wildlife: The Politics of Ecology in South Africa (London: Penguin, 1990); Brian Huntley, Roy Siegfried, and Clem Sunter, South African Environments into the 21st Century (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau Tafelberg, 1989); Brian Huntley, ed., Biotic Diversity in Southern Africa: Concepts and Conservation (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1989). The incoming African National Congress (ANC), together with its alliance partner the South African Communist Party, had been strongly aligned to the USSR and, as Douglas Weiner has shown, the Soviets were at the "cutting edge of conservation theory and practice"; see Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), viii.

5.Business Day, November 15, 2004.

6. United Nations Development Program, South Africa Human Development Report 2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 128–29.

7. J. Porritt, "Environmental Politics: The Old and the New," in Greening the Millennium: The New Politics of the Environment, ed. Michael Jacobs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 62; Neil Carter, "Prospects: The Parties and the Environment in the United Kingdom," in Greening the Millennium, ed. Jacobs, 192; Anna Bramwell, The Fading of the Greens: The Decline of Environmental Politics in the West (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); and in the South African context, see T. le Quesne, "The Divorce of Environmental and Economic Policy under the First ANC Government, 1994–1999," Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 7 (2000): 1–20.

8. Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4–5; but see Peter Coates and William Beinart, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (New York: Routledge, 1995).

9. After Indonesia and Brazil, see World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Development of a National Biodiversity Index: A Discussion Paper Prepared by World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Report of the WCMC, 15 September 1992 (Cambridge: World Conservation Monitoring Centre, 1992). See, also, Endangered Wildlife Trust, The Biodiversity of South Africa 2002: Indicators, Trends and Human Impacts (Cape Town: Struik, 2002).

10. For example, Jane Carruthers, "Africa: Histories, Ecologies and Societies," Environment and History 10 (2004): 379–406; Jane Carruthers, "Environmental History in Southern Africa: An Overview," in South Africa"s Environmental History, ed. S. Dovers, R. Edgecombe and B. Guest (Cape Town and Athens: David Philip and Ohio University Press, 2003), 3–15; Nancy Jacobs, "Latitudes and Longitudes: Comparative Perspectives on Cape Environmental history," Kronos 29 (2003): 7–29; William Beinart, "African History and Environmental History," African Affairs 99 (2000): 269–302; Phia Steyn, "A Greener Past? An Assessment of South African Environmental Historiography," New Contree 46 (November 1999): 7–27; Phia Steyn, "Environmental Management in South Africa: Twenty Years of Governmental Response to the Global Challenge," Historia 46 (2002): 25–53; Phia Steyn and André Wessels, "The Emergence of New Environmentalism in South Africa, 1988–1992," South African Historical Journal 42 (2000): 210–31; Phia Steyn, "Popular Environmental Struggles in South Africa, 1972–1992," Historia 47 (2002):125–58; S. R. Rajan, "The Ends of Environmental History: Some Questions," Environment and History 3 (1997): 245–47; E. Pawson and S. Dovers, "Environmental History and the Challenges of Interdisciplinarity: An Antipodean Perspective," Environment and History 9 (2003): 53–76; Douglas R. Weiner, "A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History," Environmental History 10 (July 2005): 404–20.

11. A. L. Dalton, book review, "On African Environmental History: Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1990" (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1999), in Current History (May 2000): 231–32.

12. See, for example, Alan Cobley, "Does Social History Have a Future? The End of Apartheid and Recent Trends in South African Historiography," Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (2001): 613–25; Tim Nuttall and John Wright, "Exploring beyond History with a Capital H," Current Writing 10 (1998): 38–61; and Bill Freund, "Urban History in South Africa," South African Historical Journal 52 (2005):19–31.

13. R. Quentin Grafton, Libby Robin, and Robert J. Wasson, Understanding the Environment: Bridging the Discipinary Divides (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2005), 8–14.

14. Raymond Suttner, former political prisoner and formerly a member of the UDF, ANC, and SACP leadership, "What Happened to the White Left?" Mail and Guardian, January 14–20, 2005.

15. An emerging literature addresses "space" and "place"; see, for example, Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall, Text, Theory, Space (London: Routledge, 1996).

16. For example, Norman Etherington, "A False Emptiness: How Historians May Have Been Misled by Early Nineteenth Century Maps of South-eastern Africa," Imago Mundi 56 (2004): 67–86; Jane Carruthers, "Friedrich Jeppe; Mapping the Transvaal, c. 1850–1899," Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (2003): 955–76; E. Worby, "Maps, Names and Ethnic Games: The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power in Northwestern Zimbabwe," Journal of Southern African Studies 20 (1994): 371–92; Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004).

17. Beinart, "African History and Environmental History."

18. Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); H. Tilley, "African Environments and Environmental Sciences: The African Research Survey, Ecological Paradigms and British Colonial Development," in Social History and African Environments, ed. William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), 109–30; H. Tilley, "Africa as a Living Laboratory" (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2001); S. Dubow, "A Commonwealth of Science: The British Association in South Africa, 1905 and 1929," in Science and Society in Southern Africa, ed. Saul Dubow (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 11–42.

19. Bill Freund, "Constrasts in Urban Segregation: A Tale of Two African Cities, Durban (South Africa) and Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire)," Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (2001): 527–46; Bill Freund, "Urban History in South Africa," South African Historical Journal 52 (2005): 19–31; Bill Freund, "Globalisation and the African City," paper presented to the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific Conference, University of Western Australia, November 2004.

20. See Malegapuru W. Makgoba, ed., African Renaissance: The New Struggle (Cape Town: Mafube Tafelberg, 1999); Fantu Cheru, African Renaissance: Roadmaps to the Challenge of Globalization (London: Zed Books, 2001); Bernard Magubane, African Sociology: Towards a Critical Perspective (Trenton N.J.: Africa World Press, 2000).

21. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State," Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (2001): 628.

22. Ellen Stroud, "Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History," History and Theory 42 (2003): 75–81.

23. Aaron Sachs, "The Ultimate 'Other': Post-colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt's Ecological Relationship with Nature," History and Theory 42 (2003): 111–35.

24. John MacKenzie, "Edward Said and the Historians," Nineteenth Century Contexts 18 (1994): 9–25. McKenzie's insight has been overlooked in books about nature conservation where "victimhood" most often infuses the literature and dictates policy direction; see, for example, W. M. Adams and M. Mulligan, Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era (London: Earthscan, 2003), while C. A. M. Attwell and F. P. D. Cotterill, "Postmodernism and African Conservation Science," Biodiversity and Conservation 9 (2000): 559–77; and John Terborgh, Carel van Schaik, Lisa Davenport, and Madhu Rao, eds., Making Parks Work: Strategies for Preserving Tropical Nature (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002), are more critical.

25. Beinart, "African History and Environmental History," 302.

26. For example, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, "Reading Forest History Backwards: The Interaction of Policy and Local Land Use in Guinea's Forest-savanna Mosaic," Environment and History 1 (1995): 55–92; James McCann, "The Plow and the Forest: Narratives of Deforestation in Ethiopia, 1840–1992", Environmental History 2 (April 1997): 138–59; Kate. B. Showers, Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).

27. See the website http://www.palgrave.com/history/transnational/index.asp for details of the forthcoming Dictionary of Transnational History.

28. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Richard Grove, Editorial, Environment and History 6 (2000): 127–29; R. Grove, "Editorial," Environment and History 1 (1995): 1–2.

29. Tom Griffiths, "How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates about Vegetation Change in Australia," Australian Journal of Botany 50 (2002): 375–89.

30. John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2000); also C. A. Bayly, "Writing World History," History Today (February 2004): 36–40.

31. The relevant websites are www.johannesburgsummit.org and www.iucn.org.

32. Just one example is Bertus De Villiers, Land Claims and National Park: The Makuleke Experience (Pretoria: HSRC, 1999); Malcolm Draper, Marja Spierenburg, and Harry Wels, "African Dreams of Cohesion: Elite Pacting and Community Development in Transfrontier Conservation Areas in Southern Africa," Culture and Organization 10 (2004): 341–53.

33. William Wolmer, "Transboundary Conservation: The Politics of Ecological Integrity in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park," Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (2003): 261–78.

34. Nancy Jacobs, "The Flowing Eye: Water Management in the Upper Kuruman Valley, South Africa, c.1800–1962," Journal of African History 37 (1996): 237–60; A. Isaacman and C. Sneddon, "Toward a Social and Environmental History of the Building of Cahora Bassa Dam," Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2000): 597–632; M. Thabane, "Shifts from Old to New Social and Ecological Environments in the Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme; Relocating Residents of the Mohale Dam Area," Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2000): 633–54; J. Tempelhoff, "Time and the River: Observations on the Vaal River as Source of Water to the Witwatersrand 1903–24," Historia 46 (May 2001): 247–70; N. Nemarundwe and W. Kozanayi, "Institutional Arrangements for Water Resource Use: A Case Study from Southern Zimbabwe," Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (2003): 193–206; J. W. N. Tempelhoff, ed., African Water Histories: Transdisciplinary Discourses (Vanderbijlpark: North-West University, 2005).

35. See Nancy Jacobs's review of Munyaredzi Chenje, State of the Environment in the Zambezi Basin 2000 (Maseru, Lusaka and Harare: SADC, IUCN, ZRA, and SARDC, 2000) at http://www.hnet.org.reviews.

36. Rosaleen Duffy, Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).

37. Jonathan S. Adams and Thomas O. McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), xvii.

38. William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor, "Introduction," in Social History and African Environments, ed. Beinart and McGregor, 2.

39. H. Els and J. du P. Bothma, "Developing Partnerships in a Paradigm Shift to Achieve Conservation Reality in South Africa," Koedoe 43 (2000): 19.

40. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

41.Protected Areas Act 2003 and Protected Areas Amendment Act 2004.

42. See, for example, Jeffrey D. Hackel, "Community Conservation and the Future of Africa's Wildlife," Conservation Biology 13 (1999): 726–34.

43. See, for example, David Mabunda, Daniel J. Pienaar, and Johan Verhoef, "The Kruger National Park: A Century of Management and Research," in The Kruger Experience: Ecology and Management of Savanna Heterogeneity, ed. Anthony Sinclair, Johan Du Toit, Kevin Rogers, and Harry Biggs (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003), 3–21; Richard Summers, "Legal and Institutional Aspects of Community Based Conservation in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia," Acta Juridica (Cape Town: Juta, 1999), 188–210.

44. Some examples are: Gregory Maddox, "'Degradation Narratives' and 'Population Time Bombs': Myths and Realities about African Environments," in South Africa's Environmental History: Cases and Comparisons, ed. Stephen Dovers, Ruth Edgecombe, and Bill Guest (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); Thackwray Driver, "Anti-erosion Policies in the Mountain Areas of Lesotho: The South African Connection," Environment and History 5 (1999): 1–26; Harri Siiskonen, "Deforestation in the Owambo Region, North Namibia, since the 1850s," Environment and History 2 (1996): 291–308; Karen Brown, "The Conservation and Utilisation of the Natural World: Silviculture in the Cape Colony, c.1902–1910," Environment and History 7 (2001): 427–48; Annika C. Dahlberg and Piers M. Blaikie, "Changes in Landscape or Interpretation? Reflections Based on the Environmental and Socio-Economic History of a Village in NE Botswana," Environment and History 5 (1999): 127–74; Nancy Jacobs, "Grasslands and Thickets: Bush Encroachment and Herding in the Kalahari Thornveld," Environment and History 6 (2000): 289–316.

45. For discussion on this topic, see K. Blaser, "The History of Nature and the Nature of History: Stephen Jay Gould on Science, Philosophy and History," The History Teacher 32 (1999): 411–30; see Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap between Science and the Humanities (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003); and Edward. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998).

46. Donald Worster, "The Two Cultures Revisited: Environmental History and the Environmental Sciences," Environment and History 2 (1996): 3–14; David Lowenthal, "Environmental History: From Genesis to Apocalypse," History Today 51 (2001): 36–44.

47. William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

48. For instance, William Beinart and K. Middleton, "Plant Transfers in Historical Perspective: A Review Article," Environment and History 10 (2004): 3–30; K. Middleton, "Who Killed 'Malagasy Cactus'? Science, Environment and Colonialism in Southern Madagascar 1924–1930," Journal of Southern African Studies 25 (1999): 215–48; Lance van Sittert, "'The Seed Blows about in Every Breeze': Noxious Weed Eradication in the Cape Colony, 1860–1899," Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2000): 655–74; Lance van Sittert, "From 'Mere Weeds' and 'Bosjes' to a Cape Floral Kingdom: The Re-imagining of Indigenous Flora at the Cape, c1890–1939," Kronos 28 (2002): 102–26.

49. Saul Dubow, "Earth History, Natural History, and Prehistory at the Cape, 1860–1875," Comparative Studies of Society and History 46 (2004): 107–13.

50. See, for example, Du Toit, Rogers, and Biggs, eds., The Kruger Experience; Stephen Budiansky, Nature's Keepers: The New Science of Nature Management (New York: The Free Press, 1995); Gretchen C. Daily, ed., Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997); and Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling, eds., Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002).

51. See, for example, Mabunda, Pienaar, and Verhoef, "The Kruger National Park," 3–21; A. C. Brown, ed., A History of Scientific Endeavour in South Africa (Cape Town: Royal Society, 1977), U. De V. Pienaar, ed., Neem uit die Verlede (Pretoria: National Parks Board, 1990).

52. R. M. Cowling, D. M. Richardson and S. M. Pierce, eds., Vegetation of Southern Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

53. Animal studies are burgeoning in the social sciences, see for example, the number of conferences on this theme, including "Animals in History: Studying the not so Human Past," held in Cologne, Germany in May 2005; and "Animals and Society Conference," held at the University of Western Australia in July 2005; and the imminent publication of a series on Human-Animal Studies to be published by Brill.

54. Harriet Ritvo, "Animal Planet," Environmental History 9 (April 2004): 204–20.

55. Sandra Swart, "'Bushveld Magic' and 'Miracle Doctors'—An Exploration of Eugene Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt's Experiences in the Waterberg, South Africa, c. 1906–1917," Journal of African History 45 (2004): 237–55.

56. K. Brown, "Science, the Agricultural Environment and the Evolution of Economic Entomology in the Cape Colony, 1895–1910," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, Providence, R.I., March 2003; S. Swart," The Ant of the White Soul: Popular Natural History, the Politics of Afrikaner Identity and the Entomological Writings of Eugene Marais," in Social History and African Environments, ed. Beinart and McGregor; P. Harries, "Field Sciences in Scientific Fields: Entomology, Botany and the Early Ethnographic Monograph in the Work of H.-A. Junod," in Science and Society in Southern Africa, ed. Saul Dubow (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 11–42.

57. See, for example, Paul L. Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline, 1760–1850 (Dordrecht: D. Riedel,1982); Libby Robin, The Flight of the Emu: A Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 1901–2001 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2001); Mark V. Barrow, A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); L. Mayo, "Birds and the Hand of Power: A Political Geography of Avian Life in the Gansu Corridor, Ninth to Tenth Centuries," East Asian History 24 (2002): 1–66.

58. Jane Carruthers, "'Our Beautiful and Useful Allies': Aspects of Ornithology in 20th-century South Africa," Historia 49 (2004): 89–109; Nancy Jacobs, "European Ornithology and Indigenous Knowledge in Southern Africa," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, Providence, R.I., March 2003; see, also, Charles K. Brain, Austin Roberts: A Lifelong Devotion to South Africa's Birds and Beasts (Cape Town: John Voelcker Bird Book Fund, 1998).

59. Lance van Sittert, "'Keeping the Enemy at Bay': The Extermination of Wild Carnivora in the Cape Colony, 1889–1910," Environmental History 3 (July 1998): 333–56; William Beinart, "The Night of the Jackal: Sheep, Pastures and Predators in the Cape," Past and Present 158 (1998): 172–206.

60. Robert J. Gordon, "Fido: Dog Tales of Colonialism in Namibia," in Social History and African Environments, ed. Beinart and McGregor, 240–54; Jacob Tropp, "Dogs, Poison and the Meaning of Colonial Intervention in the Transkei, South Africa," Journal of African History 43 (2002): 451–72; Johan Gallant, The Story of the African Dog (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002). See, also, "Feature: Canis Familiaris—A Dog History of South Africa," South African Historical Journal 48 (2003): 138–251; and Marguerite Poland, David Hammond-Tooke and Leigh Voigt, The Abundant Herds: A Celebration of the Nguni Cattle of the Zulu People (Cape Town: Fernwood, 2003).

61. Malcolm Draper, "Going Native? Trout and Settling Identity in a Rainbow Nation," Historia 48 (2003): 55–94.

62. Nancy Jacobs, "The Great Bophuthatswana Donkey Massacre: Discourse on the Ass, Politics of Class and Grass," The American Historical Review 108 (2001): 485–507.

63. Harriet Ritvo, "Destroyers and Preservers: Big Game in the Victorian Empire," History Today (January 2002): 33–39. But see Lance van Sittert, "Bringing in the Wild: The Commodification of Wild Animals the Cape Colony/Province c. 1850–1950," Journal of African History 46 (2005): 269–91.

64. For an earlier apartheid era analysis, see Stephen Ellis, "Of Elephants and Men: Politics and Nature Conservation in South Africa," Journal of Southern African Studies 20 (1994): 53–69.

65. Duffy, Killing for Conservation, chap. 6, "Buying Influence? The Politics of Donor and NGO Involvement."

66. South African National Parks, "Report on the Elephant Management Strategy: Reports to the Minister: Environmental Affairs and Tourism on Developing Elephant Management Plans for National Parks with Recommendations on the Process to be Followed, 8 September 2005"; L. Gillson and K. Lindsay, "Ivory and Ecology—Changing Perspectives on Elephant Management and the International Trade in Ivory," Environmental Science and Policy 6 (2003): 411–19; Ian Whyte, Rudi van Aarde, and Stuart Pim, "Kruger's Elephant Population: Its Size and Consequences for Ecosystem Heterogeneity," in The Kruger Experience, ed. Du Toit, Rogers and Biggs; S. Fakir, Director, IUCN, South Africa, "Notes on the Ethics of Elephant Culling," unpublished talk to the Ethics Society Congress of South Africa, March 30, 2004.

67. Timothy Luke, "The World Wildlife Fund: Ecocolonialism as Funding the Worldwide 'Wise Use' of Nature," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology 8 (1997): 31–61.

68. C. M. Attwell and F. P. D. Cotterill, "Postmodernism and African Conservation Science," Biodiversity and Conservation 9 (2000): 559–77. But see, also, Anthony Hall-Martin and Jane Carruthers, eds., South African National Parks: A Celebration (Johannesburg: Horst Klemm, 2003), for a move in this direction, and also the TPARI teleseminar paper by Nick King and Harry Biggs, "Seeking Common Ground: How Natural and Social Scientists Might Jointly Create a Worldview for Sustainable Livelihoods," November 17, 2005.

69. Quoted in D. Rejeski and R L. Olsen, "Has Futurism Failed?," The Wilson Quarterly 30 (2006): 21.

70. Lynne Heasley, "Reflections on Walking Contested Land: Doing Environmental History in West Africa and the United States," Environmental History 10 (2005): 510–31.

71. Weiner, "Definition of Environmental History," 409.

72. Heasley, "Reflections on Walking Contested Land," 528.

73. Gregory H. Maddox, "Living Along an African River," Environmental History 10 (October 2005): 721–23.

74. A theme encouraged by Donald Worster at the Nordic Environmental History Conference, Finland, September 15–17, 2005; see also Jane Carruthers, Wildlife and Warfare: The Life of James Stevenson-Hamilton (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001).

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